She spends hours crouched in puddles of muck, hunched over a microscope or glued to a computer, but one gets the sense that Sasha Oystryk couldn't be happier. She's an intern with Environment Canada, and she's thriving on the range of tasks and challenges given to her.

"I'm being exposed to so many different aspects of the environmental field," says Oystryk, a recent graduate of Yukon College's Renewable Resource Management program.

"The purpose of an internship is to help build skills and gain experience. I wasn't 100 per cent sure which direction I wanted to go, so this is giving me the chance to try out many different things."

This is her 'second' career, after having worked as an optician for several years. She found she was developing a keen interest in science and the outdoors, and decided to return to school.

Though Oystryk was the only one of her Yukon College classmates to land an internship, others also found related work. One student became a conservation officer, another works in heritage interpretation, and another worked as a fisheries technician this summer with Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Oystryk is one of three YMCA-sponsored interns currently placed with Environment Canada. She is the Environmental Assessment Intern, and she says she is developing quite an interest in 'EA'.

"There's so much to know about legislation and various Acts, and you need to know your biology. You need to know what lives out there and how it's affected. The basis of EA is environmental monitoring, which is what I'm working on."

Since May, Oystryk has continued to contribute to the Benthic Information System for the Yukon, known as BISY. This complex database captures information about benthic invertebrates collected in the Yukon in the last two decades.

The term 'benthic' refers to the bottom layers of an aquatic environment. It's the muck or debris that covers the bottom and creates habitat for invertebrates. Most aquatic insects are best viewed at 10 to 20 times magnification, but as Oystryk explains, that doesn't make them less important.

"We can use benthic invertebrates as indicators of stream health because they're sensitive to their environment."

"It's fascinating how many insects are out there, and to learn that each has an important role in the system. We can learn so much from them."

Oystryk has spent some time in the field gathering samples with a kick-net, and the balance of her hours are in the office working on the BISY system or performing lab-related work.

"A digital camera in the microscope is connected to the computer, so I'm also incorporating photographs of the specimens into the database," says Oystryk, pointing to a leggy, segmented creature displayed on her monitor.

She explains that it's importance to have protocols and standards in place so that more data can be included in BISY. The problem is that when samples aren't collected or analyzed the same way, they often cannot be used.

"Some Yukon data goes back to the 1970s, and there's a wealth of recent information. But not all of it can be included in stream health analyses because of differences in methodology."

With that a concern at a national level, Environment Canada developed the Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN) and recently established protocols. The Whitehorse office sent Oystryk to Vancouver for five days of training that covered everything from how to collect invertebrates to statistics to software.

She'll continue to work on BISY through the winter, integrating what she learned at the workshop with the Yukon database.

A limited amount of data, such as site information, stream chemistry and biological data, is available online through BISY in a GIS format at www.ec.gc.ca/bisy/search_e/home_e.asp.